


Aurora

by BlueMoonHound



Series: Lucretia [17]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Mutual Pining, Sharing a Bed, Stolen Century
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-19
Updated: 2018-04-19
Packaged: 2019-04-25 03:48:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14370267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlueMoonHound/pseuds/BlueMoonHound
Summary: “I guess it's just you and me,” Davenport says, after the rest of the crew has dispersed. Lucretia clutches her notebook a little tighter.“Yes,” She settles on. She's feeling a little nervous.





	Aurora

“I guess it's just you and me,” Davenport says, after the rest of the crew has dispersed. Lucretia clutches her notebook a little tighter.

“Yes,” She settles on. She's feeling a little nervous.

They'd found the light, here, because the locals are so very friendly. In trade for information and scientific blueprints they had readily given it to them. They're not quite human, not quite any race that Lucretia has met yet – long tails and twitching ears like a cat, but bipedal and on the taller side unlike the animals from their first cycle. Magnus likes them a lot.

Davenport had been in town yesterday, and had heard about a local festival – the civilization here had predicted a rare event would happen in the sky, and invited the crew to watch with them. It was an honor to be invited, and Lucretia was excited for the trip, but most of the crew had decided to stay behind this time, so she would be alone with the captain.

She's glad she doesn't have to go alone, though. She probably wouldn't go at all if she had to be alone on the trip, because honestly, she's not so sure and comfortable about being in strange places on her own. It's been nine years now, but she hasn't gotten used to the constant change in scenery. She's still struggling to wrap her head around the hunger, around their plight, around her own immortality. It's too big.

Of course, Captain Davenport shows none of this worry or fear. He has himself put together.

“We'll set off tomorrow,” Davenport says, hopping down from the smaller of the two couches. “Do you like wine?”

“I – Yes?” Lucretia says. She does like wine, but why would Davenport bring it up?

“Good. I'll pack some. See you in the morning, Maryam.”

“I'll see you then,” she says. Her heart patters away in her chest for a few moments, and then she stands up and heads to her quarters.

Better start packing.

 

The morning is brisk and pleasant, the trees tall and the air cool. Honestly, Lucretia couldn't ask for better travel conditions. The sun is just beginning to poke above the horizon, shooting long glimmers of light through the trees. Mist is settling as dew onto the leaves of the undergrowth, glistening in the fresh light. Davenport demands a somewhat slower pace than she could keep, but that just means she can take in the sights. It's slow enough that she can hold her notebook with one hand and draw things as they pass, or jot down passing observations. In the past, he's ridden on Magnus's shoulders when they went on long journeys. She much prefers this pace, though. She's a romantic.

As the sun rises, Lucretia becomes more and more glad that she wore shorts today. Davenport has his jacket tied around his waist already. She eyes his bare shoulders and decides to follow suit, rolling her robe around itself so it won't drag on the ground.

They pause around noon and sit down on some rocks just off the trail to eat a small meal. Lucretia nibbles at a piece of bread.

“Why did you become a captain, Davenport?” she asks, just fishing for a conversation.

Davenport's ears flick back a little. “I'm interested in planar research.”

“Well – yes, but aren't gnomes rather social?”

Davenport laughs. “As a species, yes.” He shrugs. “I never fit the archetype.”

“You're socializing right now,” She chuckles. “It might be good for me to know, for--”

He hunches over a little. “Maryam, it's not any of your business.”

Lucretia fiddles with her bread for a minute in silence.

“You can call me Lucretia, you know,” she tries. “It's been nine years now.”

Davenport doesn't answer.

After that conversation, the silence between them is just a little tenser. They reach a clearing around nightfall, just as planned, and set down their packs. Lucretia listens as Davenport reminds her how to assemble the tent.

Lucretia's bedroll fills more than half the space.

“Do you want me to change outside?” Davenport asks, digging around in his pack.

“Oh- no, it's fine,” Lucretia says. “I'm sorry about earlier. I didn't mean to push the conversation in a direction you were unwilling to go.”

“You didn't do anything wrong.” He tugs off his shirt. A fine trail of bright red fur runs down his spine, disappearing under his waistline and reappearing on the top of his tail. It looks soft. Lucretia tears her eyes away and starts looking for her own pajamas. By the time she finishes dressing, Davenport is already curled up in his bedroll.

“Good night,” Lucretia mumbles.

“Night,” comes a muffled reply.

 

It's improper. That's all there is to it. He's not supposed to date subordinates.

Even Davenport can't convince himself that's the only reason he's uncomfortable with how much he likes some of his staff members. They're not getting paid anymore. The group they worked for no longer exists. They have no one to go back to, no one to tell them what to do anymore. A little bit of fear and sorrow tugs in his chest again at the thought. His work for the IPRE, he spent his whole life on that, even before he joined. And yet, and yet, with all that still intact and thriving, he can't help missing his family.

Lucretia's right. It's been nearly a decade. A decade this cycle, in fact, and he's still calling her _Maryam_. He still calls Barold _Bluejeans_ and Magnus _Burnsides_ and Merle _Highchurch_. The only members of the crew he refers to by first name are the ones that do not even have a family one.

Long story short, Davenport can't sleep. It happens, of course. He has his anxieties and stressors. There are things that keep him awake, whether it's work or worry. Right now, it errs on the side of worry. _You've known her for thirteen years. Why are you so worried? Is it because she's human, or because she's- what – young?_ That's a species gap. That's just because she's human again, if that concern even pops up. Davenport is older than Lucretia would ever have lived, were fate to allow her a normal human lifespan.

It doesn't matter, because it's easiest to say he's not allowed to pursue his crush. It's easiest to get up in the morning and keep being cool and composed, to reassure her if she's concerned but go no further.

It's not nice. He'd love to explain planar physics to her. He knows Barry has already, but he knows Lucretia would want his perspectives. They could talk all day. He'd love to know what interests her about this plane, and about the event they're travelling to see. He knows so little about Lucretia, he realizes. She's gentle and shy and very, very intelligent. She's tall and capable of being more imposing than she knows she is. Her smile fills the room. And yet, he's never really _talked_ to her.

Sometimes, though, as a captain, he can't have nice things.

 _Enough_ , Davenport thinks. He rolls over again, clutching his tail in one hand, and forces himself to sleep.

 

The morning is once again groggy and foggy. Davenport forces himself to sit up and get his bedroll packed back into his bag before he wakes Lucretia, who blinks at him for a minute before realizing where she is. She promptly follows his lead, and then helps him take the tent down, rolling it back up and strapping it onto her pack again. They set off, Davenport a few feet in the lead.

He used to feel bad about having to slow down taller species. He's spent more time around taller folks than he has around gnomes, even back on homeworld at the IPRE headquarters. He doesn't feel so bad about it anymore. He's gotten used to being stubborn and practical. If the group is in a hurry, someone carries him. This is much more pleasant than that, though. Once the pace is established, Lucretia wanders. She draws quick sketches of local flora and fauna. Her eyes are wide with awe as she stares at the leaves of the trees. They smell like catnip and aren't a species that existed on homeworld, or any of the previous planes.

Davenport loves her enthusiasm. It's half of why he hired her in the first place. She's so willing to look, to listen, to feel and know, and her writing – well, it expresses that. It's beautiful. When she's tugged out of a corner, her enthusiasm extends beyond the living world, too. She loves to know what people like and what they hate. She's memorized every type of mushroom that Barry avoids at dinner and started telling Taako not to cook. The two of them got in a small spat over that, because certain mushrooms are apparently necessary to some dishes. In the end, Lucretia just ended up picking out all the mushrooms from Barry's bowl before he arrived at the table (He's always late, he's always working) and putting them in her own.

Davenport can't stop himself from chuckling softly.

“What is it?” Lucretia asks, looking up from whatever she's writing or drawing.

He picks up his pace just a little so he can peer over her shoulder. She's drawn a very small beetle, but the beetle's gone. Notes along the side explain its iridescent green color. “Just thinking about you.”

She smiles. “Am I funny?”

“I'll amend that. I was thinking about you but I was laughing about Bluejeans.”

“You know you can call him by his first name, too, right?” Lucretia stands up and jots something down in her notebook. Davenport's eyes come up to the hem of her shorts. They're awfully short shorts, which is reasonable with how hot it is out here, but also, for reasons that Davenport can't entirely wrap his head around, a little distracting.

“I'm uh, sorry about yesterday,” Lucretia says, clutching her journal. She does that when she's nervous, Davenport realizes. “I shouldn't have--”

“Lucretia.” He interrupts. She goes silent. “You did nothing wrong.”

He starts walking. He can feel Lucretia staring after him.

 

Davenport called her by name.

Lucretia realizes in that moment that she doesn't know Davenport's first name. She doesn't know much about him at all. She knows a lot more than she did at the IPRE, though. He's not just stiff and formal. He smiles sometimes. One time he got so angry he threw a glass at a wall, but she can't remember why. He wasn't angry at the crew. It might have been the hunger, the hunger tends to have that sort of effect on all of them. She shivers. She's so glad they've saved this world.

She can tell when he's emotional because his tail wags, like it is right now – like a cat's, a long, slow swish. She recalls something about sensory stimulation, about tail wagging being an energy release, which is why species with tails wag them at all. She wonders what kind of emotion he's experiencing. Is he upset with her?

Lucretia shakes herself out of her reverie long enough to realize that he's a bit ahead of her, and jogs a bit to catch up. She opens up her notebook again. She almost closes it.

“Davenport?”

“Yes?”

“Why do you want to see the astronomical event?”

“I'm a scientist.”

Lucretia closes her notebook and puts it in her bag. She grips the shoulderstraps with both her hands.

“It's because I think that space is beautiful, Lucretia.”

Lucretia licks her lips. “You know,” she says. “When I was six, I saw my first shooting star. And I was astonished.”

“That was the first time you saw a meteor? That's--” he pauses. “Actually, I have no idea what human childhoods run like.”

She laughs. “I could tell you.”

He hums. Lucretia can't tell if that's a yes or a no.

“I think I was only fifteen when I saw my first meteor shower,” Davenport says. He scratches his chin. “I spent a lot of time thinking about the known planar system as a child. I almost ran away, when I was twenty-three. I only didn't because I knew I would still be too young for any college to accept me. Basically the equivalent of a human running away from home at age nine,” Davenport chuckles.

“I was fifteen when I ran away,” Lucretia says. “But fifteen is more like early forties for a gnome, I would think.”

“Why did you run away?”

“Money, mostly. My parents couldn't afford to feed us all, and there were no publication opportunities in my home town. So I left. I suppose it wasn't exactly running away. My parents weren't bad people, but I never kept in touch. I never liked them much to start with.” Lucretia shrugs. “They were, fine, I suppose. I published my first biography less than a year later.”

“That's pretty incredible, Lucretia,” Davenport says.

“Oh,” Lucretia feels a blush creep up her face. “It's-- well, that's why you hired me, right? I've been writing non stop since I learned how.”

“Yes, that's true,” Davenport says. “That doesn't stop it from being incredible. You're incredible.”

“Thank you,” Lucretia says. Davenport smiles. It's radiant.

 

Davenport notices the absence of the discomfort he had felt yesterday while they're setting up the tent. Maybe talking is good, he considers. It can have its benefits, for sure. Not that he ever doubted that talking can have its benefits, but he's never worked through a social problem so quickly.

“We've been walking for almost two days straight, now,” Lucretia says. “My feet are sore.”

“We should get to the clearing around midday tomorrow, at this pace,” Davenport says. “I'm sorry about your feet.”

She laughs. “Just means that I left homeworld with a shitty unfit body.” She unrolls her bedroll. Humans are so large. This tent could easily fit four gnomes, or hell – maybe even four dwarves, but certainly not more than one human. His own bedroll ends up overlapping the edge of hers, but he has more room at his head and feet to put their supplies.

“You were perfectly fit for the mission we intended to be on,” Davenport says. He rubs his arms. It's chilly out, tonight.

“Yes, but, well, I mean,” Lucretia pauses, trying to get her thoughts around words. “I should be fit enough to hike for a few days anyway, right?”

Davenport frowns. Lucretia rolls over in her blanket to look at him, her hair loose like a fluffy white cloud around her face. He didn't know that Lucretia has insecurities about fitness.

“Lucretia, you're not required to be _anything_.” His frown deepens. “Just alive. Gods above, you're not even required to be alive anymore, really, because we all have second and third and fourth chances in this strange situation we've landed ourselves in. But especially this cycle?” He laughs humorlessly, doing little to break the tension. “We've found the light. Write what you want to. What makes you happy. If that's everything, then so be it. But there's no set requirement or standard. Maybe there will be. Maybe at some point in the future we'll need to be stronger and faster than we are now. But now, Lucretia? Now we can stop worrying and rest and watch something beautiful happen in the sky.”

Silence fills the air where his rant had been. For a few minutes, Lucretia just watches him, blinking occasionally. He watches back, shivering in the cold.

“You're cold,” Lucretia says.

“Yes.”

She lifts up an edge of her blanket. “I'm warm, if you… if you want to.”

It takes a few more moments for Davenport to recognize that she's suggesting they cuddle. They certainly don't need to. If he gets in his bedroll, he'll warm up sufficiently. It's not below freezing, so he won't die of cold tonight.

But it's a tempting offer.

“Alright,” He says, finally. Fuck it.

Lucretia smiles, just a little. He climbs into her blanket cocoon and presses his face into her neck. She is warm, warm and soft with her heart beating right where he can hear it and the scent of several days walking in the woods wafting from her skin – sweat and bark and earth. His heart wrenches when he realizes that he missed this kind of contact, all those years that he separated himself out. He wiggles closer as Lucretia tucks the edge of the blanket back under their bodies.

Sleep comes easy this time.

 

Davenport hasn't woken up in another person's arms in over half a century. Logically, it's a bit of a surprise to be pressed against Lucretia's chest as he awakens, her long arms wrapped around his back. It's not bad, but she is, like she said the previous night, very, very warm, and at this point the space heater effect is starting to be sweaty.

Davenport extricates himself from Lucretia's arms as carefully as possible. She stirs but doesn't wake. He'll let her rest for a few more minutes.

He packs up his bags and carries them out into the morning sunlight. He has a notebook, he realizes. He could write something if he wanted to. He pokes around til he finds it, and decides to try his hand at drawing. He turns his focus to the tall catnip trees around him, trying his best to capture their likeness.

Lucretia steps out of the tent about ten minutes later, still in her pajamas, stretching her arms over her head. She pads over to where Davenport is sitting and looks down at what he's working on. It takes all his energy not to snap his notebook closed. He's not a good artist the way she is.

“Drawing the trees?”

“Yes.”

“Hm.” Lucretia smiles. “Drawing is good.” She pauses, considering. “I should get dressed.”

And then she's gone. Davenport finds himself drawing the silence.

She comes back out a few minutes later and starts taking down the tent, all on her own. He closes his notebook then, putting it back in his bag and hurrying over to help.

“How are your feet feeling today?”

“What? Oh, fine, but my legs are aching instead,” Lucretia chuckles. “Lots of walking, am I right?”

“At least we won't have anywhere to be on the way back,” Davenport says. “We can slow down then.” He's looking forward to that. His legs are aching too, proportionally he's been going much faster than Lucretia.

“Yeah,” Lucretia says, throwing her bag over her shoulder. “Shall we?” She offers him a hand.

He takes it with a smile.

 

Lucretia was under exaggerating that morning. Her legs ache like hell. She should have – maybe, she doesn't know, but – stretched before they went off, because this is ridiculous. She tries to keep going for a little while, but only a few hours into their walk she decides she has to sit down. She plops down on a fallen tree with a sigh.

“Lucretia?”

“I'll catch up,” Lucretia says. “Just need a break.”

“No you won't,” Davenport says, turning around and trotting back, sitting down next to her. He offers her the water bottle.

“What?”

“We don't have to be at the clearing until nightfall. There's no harm in taking a break.”

Lucretia takes the water bottle. Gods she's thirsty.

“Besides, my own legs were getting tired,” he adds. She lowers the waterbottle.

“Really?”

“Lucretia, I'm three feet tall.”

“That's fair.” She sips the water again before handing it off.

Davenport puts the waterbottle back in his bag. He sits for a moment before leaning into Lucretia's side.

Her eyebrows shoot up. Two days ago, this would absolutely not be happening.

She puts an arm around his shoulder and digs out her notebook. Might as well write till she feels better.

 

They reach the clearing around sunset. Dozens of locals are already gathered, sitting out on blankets or just in the grass. Davenport digs out a blanket and lays it over their legs. Then he reaches back into his bag and pulls out two porcelain mugs and a bottle of wine, removing the newsprint that had kept them intact on their journey and stuffing it back into the pockets.

“Wine?”

Lucretia smiles. “Oh you know.” She takes one of the mugs and holds it out. Davenport uncorks the wine bottle with a simple spell and pours her half a mugful. Then, he does the same for his own.

“Where's this one from?” Lucretia asks.

“Cycle three,” Davenport says. “Remember that one winery?”

“Ohhh, yes I do.”

She takes a sip. It's rich, fruity, and delicious. It reminds her a bit of cranberries. Goodness, Lucretia hasn't seen a cranberry since they left homeworld.

They enjoy their wine for a little bit, and the quiet of each other's presence. The sky goes dark and an aurora borealis blooms across the night. Strands of color dance and bloom in long ribbons. It's not exactly like any aurora borealis that Lucretia has ever seen before, either, on any other plane. It's unique because so is this world. It's breathtaking.

She looks down, and there's the aurora again, dancing across Davenport's violet irises.

“Davenport?”

“Mhm?”

“Can I kiss you?”

He looks at her, a little surprised, and for a moment she's afraid- but then he stands up and sighs yes under his breath and they're pressing their lips together. His whiskers are scratchy but his lips are soft and the world, just for today, is color and peace and hope.

They pull away, breathless, recognizing something that had been waiting between them this whole time.

Davenport blinks up at her, and then leans his head onto her shoulder, watching the sky again. He sips his wine.

“By the way,” Davenport smiles. “You can call me Andrew.”

Lucretia's heart wells up with emotion.

She's glad they went alone.

**Author's Note:**

> lil break from blupjeans for more davencretia. :p

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [abide with me](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17650142) by [Capitola](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Capitola/pseuds/Capitola)




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